Posted by Jordan Pusey
Many organizations in the healthcare sector make use of Epic printing to handle the complex and ever-increasing demands associated with electronic health record (EHR) and electronic medical record (EMR) print management. Epic printing solutions can be incredibly valuable in this regard, but they’re not exactly known for being easy to use, stable or low maintenance. Depending on the size of the organization, it’s not uncommon to find individuals or whole teams dedicated to the task of minimizing Epic printing problems in order to keep printing available and functional for end users.
There are a variety of potential problems with Epic printing solutions in any EMR/EHR print management application. Their sheer number can make it difficult for organizations to pinpoint their top Epic printing problems in order to set about correcting the most time- or resource-intensive among them. To help you narrow them down, let’s take a look at some of the most common:
- Print redirection problems: Epic printing, like some virtualization solutions, relies on print redirection to link client computers to printers. This sounds straightforward in principle, but it can lead to additional and unnecessary complexity in EHR or EMR print management (see below) as well as routine printing issues.
- Limited (or absent) print reporting and tracking: Insight into your print environment is crucial, especially in the healthcare sector. Unfortunately, most Epic printing solutions deliver very little detail—even of the most basic kind, such as printer usage and job tracking—on printing activity. Yet this information is essential for formulating efficiency initiatives and even maintaining an acceptable level of security.
- Labor-intensive EMR and EHR print management: When changes need to be made across multiple Epic print servers (EPSs), admins have to perform these manually for each instance. Simply adding a printer, for example, has to be repeated for each EPS, which turns a routine task into time-consuming drudgery. Furthermore, each manual intervention increases the risk of human error and could lead to hours of troubleshooting.
- Poor driver management: This could fall under EHR/EMR print management, but it’s worthy of a category unto itself because of its wide-reaching effects. Outdated, incompatible or incorrectly deployed printer drivers can cause no end of Epic printing problems — from harmless but annoying error messages to major client or server crashes. Yet basic driver management is a huge headache and hard to perfect, even with solid best practices in place.
If one or all of these are among your top Epic printing problems, it might be a good idea to consider migrating to PrinterLogic to restore stability, manageability and ease of use to your Epic printing environment along with streamlining EMR and EHR print management.
PrinterLogic’s next-generation enterprise print management solution is able to leverage the strengths of Epic printing while addressing its shortcomings through features like centralized management and seamless integration with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions like Citrix and VMware. Unlike lesser Epic printing solutions, PrinterLogic allows you to add, edit or remove printers from a single pane of glass and have that single change instantly propagate to every printer on every EPS. This alone has the potential to save hundreds of hours in EHR/EMR print management each year.
As organizations like OhioHealth have discovered, PrinterLogic is the perfect complement to Epic printing for other reasons, too. PrinterLogic’s virtually unlimited scalability allow your print environment to grow without sacrificing the visibility that’s vital to maintaining efficiency. Plus its versatility and rapid deployment make it ideally suited to any healthcare organization, large or small. Whatever your top Epic printing problems might be, PrinterLogic is your top Epic printing solution.